The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  “What are your plans for me?”

  “Mr. Pinkerton said you are a handoff, nothing more. Whoever encountered you between Washington and Chicago was to ensure your safe passage back to the District.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “If we were to find a diary upon you, we were to take it.”

  Fiona, still half dressed, stood up.

  “Please sit, Mrs. McFadden. I imagine your interlude with the soldiers in Defiance would have been briefer if the diary Mr. Pinkerton wants was still in your possession. I don’t have you here to assault you. You remain a handoff, and I will get you back to Washington.”

  After both had changed into their nightdresses, Warne and Fiona folded their own clothing atop their bags at the foot of the bed. The owner of the house escorted them through the main room to a short, six-rung ladder propped against a loft built into a corner of the farmhouse’s roof. There was a small featherbed atop the loft, and Warne and Fiona shared it for the night.

  THE NEXT MORNING they washed again and then made their way to Columbus, where Fiona decided, in a burst of extravagance she felt was well deserved, to spend $15 on a new dress and another $3 on fresh undergarments that she bought on the High Street near Union Station. Her old clothing still smelled of cigar smoke—or at least she believed the odor still lingered, and in that moment she recognized that quite possibly for the rest of her life the smell of a cigar would weaken her knees or cause her imagination to race and strain against an unseen fear.

  At 11:15 A.M. the women boarded the CC&C to Cincinnati, where they would pick up a spur of the B&O that would then take them through Parkersburg, Grafton, Cumberland, and Harpers Ferry before they reached Washington. Fiona would also miss her rendezvous with Alexander Gardner, but for now there was little she could do to remedy that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE PRISONER

  “Step back and dodge the fist,” Dr. McFadden shouted. “Dodge it!”

  “I can’t step back.”

  “Learn to step back, even with your leg. You’ll need that skill.”

  Temple was no longer crossing the Atlantic aboard the Washington when he dreamt. On firm land now, in Manhattan, he was a teenager whose father was driving him as hard as he ever had.

  “You are an Irish immigrant in a hostile land. My money won’t protect you from that. Improve yourself. Defend yourself.”

  A private tutor for math, science, and literature. Endless books and lessons. The silliness with his cane that began on the ship had become a regular affair, three days a week; a fencing master would come to their rooms near Union Square and train Temple to defend himself with his cane. And now training in fisticuffs, also three days a week.

  “Dodge the fist!”

  Temple would sometimes sulk, worn down by the schedule.

  “I’ll run away.”

  “You’ll never run away,” his father would reply, laughing and pulling him close.

  And he wouldn’t. He was content and felt safe near his father. On days when he did complain—and the complaining came from the rigors of his work rather than simple whining—he knew what would follow: a trip with his father to Barnum’s American Museum to see Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid, a visit to the Astor Library on Lafayette Street to find poetry, an outing to the far northern edge of the city at 40th Street and Fifth Avenue to walk on the ramparts of the Croton Reservoir, vaudeville at Niblo’s Garden, or—the best treat of all—a trip across the river to Hoboken to watch the Emmetts and the Sarsfields go after each other in a hurling match.

  Dr. McFadden also took Temple for visits with Archbishop Hughes, the man his father simply called “Conscience.” The doctor burst with pride that the Catholic prelate was remaking the city with schools for boys and girls, with threats to dispatch his burgeoning flock into the streets and turn all of Manhattan into a “second Moscow” if Protestants torched any more churches, and with the creation of a bank that catered to the Irish. The archbishop was doing all of this, Dr. McFadden noted, with a deep and hardy love of the Lord Almighty—an apparently vengeful God who, Temple reflected, forgave the prelate’s eye-for-an-eye enthusiasm for arson.

  In time, Temple came to love the archbishop even as he abandoned the Church itself. The prelate had impressed upon Temple the need to learn how to “navigate,” as he put it, and to that end encouraged him at the age of sixteen to look in on the meetings at Hibernian Hall on Prince Street, where, the archbishop advised, Temple might get to know the Irish political leaders and ward heelers beginning to assert some control over the city.

  Cards and dice were as prevalent as politics at the Hibernian, and it was there that Temple first learned how to play faro, and where he first discovered the hungry, sexual throb of watching and betting on how dice spilled across the end of a table. He came to love the feel of the dice in his hand and the uncertain moment that came between rolling them in his palm and casting them into the air like doves, waiting for them to fall, turn, and tell him his fortune.

  It was also at the Hibernian that he met George Matsell, New York’s police commissioner, who convinced him, on his nineteenth birthday, and much to his father’s unremitting dismay, to become a patrolman.

  “You can be a man of letters or a professional. Why the police?”

  “It feels real to me, Father. It’s close to things.”

  “Diogenes.”

  “Your son.”

  Within months, Matsell, having recognized the unique constellation of skills, insight, and stubbornness harbored within the McFadden boy, promoted Temple to detective and boosted his salary to $50 a month. In a city half a million people strong and littered with murder, robbery, and graft, Temple had a gift for unraveling the tangled ends of calamities and violent disagreements.

  “You have to love Manhattan,” Matsell would say. “Every block. You have to love it because most of the time this city will not love you back.”

  Often Temple just worked harder than the rest of the scoffs in the department, but he also had an affinity for the work. He could cultivate the person who saw something untoward or amiss, and find the right crevice or melody in the conversation that offered more than the person knew or felt able to tell. At crime scenes, he spotted the torn piece of fabric or the broken bracelet that had the most promising provenance; he probed wounds to date their vintage and cause; he learned about the gangs and the pols and the swells and the whores and the merchants and the entertainers and the workers, becoming a part of the city’s tapestry; he learned where points and people intersected—at what hour, in what place, on which street—and kept that map in his mind whenever he was called on to lend his eyes and ears to an investigation.

  When esteemed phrenologists encouraged the department’s budding contingent of detectives to examine the shapes and sizes of suspects’ skulls, jaws, and brows to determine their propensity for committing crimes, Temple dismissed the training as quackery, pointing out that all he and his cohorts needed to do was examine the scene and the circumstances.

  So it was that when one of the biggest fires on Pearl Street was blamed on a band of four disgruntled black dockworkers from Fulton and South, Temple spent hours inside what remained of the van der Donk Glass and Furnishings Emporium. After picking through the scorched rubble and splintered, pitch-black beams inside, he discovered several singed tin canisters ornamented with sets of small initials, A.P.G., around their rims. A thin trace of kerosene still swam in the bottom of one of the tins. While many buildings in Manhattan were converting to kerosene and even gas for lighting, the van der Donk works were still being illuminated traditionally, with whale oil. An abundance of kerosene in the building was an anomaly. And next door to Ilspeth van der Donk’s family office in the Merchants’ Exchange Cellar on Front Street was Roscoe’s, lower Manhattan’s largest purveyor of kerosene, turpentine, and other highly flammable lighting fuels, all of which the company distributed in distinctive tins that Roscoe’s believed helped distinguish its enterprise
from more downmarket competitors. The tins were stamped with the initials of Roscoe’s Canadian partner, Abraham Pineo Gesner, who held a patent on refining kerosene and had set up a separate and thriving Long Island facility, the North American Kerosene Gas Light Company, to produce it.

  Barton Roscoe noted when Temple interviewed him that Ilspeth van der Donk himself had purchased an unusually large supply of kerosene just days before the fire. Roscoe said that his company had loaded at least three-score tins on the back of a van der Donk supply wagon. After much to-ing and fro-ing, Ilspeth confessed to Temple that he had used kerosene to set fire to his store in order to collect upon an insurance policy he had secured on the property months before.

  It was a highly publicized case that endeared Temple to New York’s abolitionists, particularly the influentials at the Anti-Slavery Society, who began courting him and, in short order, converted him to their cause. For many of them, Abraham Lincoln was a hero—flawed and not always reliable, to be sure, but a hero nonetheless.

  I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free.

  As time went on and Temple spent more evenings socializing and circulating among the society’s members, he absorbed their adoration of Lincoln.

  We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

  The van der Donk case also earned Temple the devotion of Tommy Driscoll, the police department’s veteran sleuth, who noted to anyone in earshot that “young Temple McFadden is a prodigy and a wizard, goddammit.” The case also put him at odds with the business class and right-minded gentry in Manhattan, who found Temple’s dedication to the Negro to be an overly enthusiastic intrusion upon their desire that the police force simply serve their needs.

  The police force that Temple joined was a motley and loosely corrupt band of hooligans, one of out of five of whom were Irish. They had no uniforms, enforced order (or administered random and often questionable beatings) at the end of a billy club, and paid more attention to the prerogatives of the city’s network of neighborhood aldermen than to Matsell or anyone else in the department’s hierarchy. Matsell, a Brit, said he wanted to model New York’s police force on the English constabulary put in place by Sir Robert Peel, but the bobbies were meant to be a quasi-military presence on London’s streets. Americans, Matsell well knew, would never stand for a police presence that so closely resembled and reminded them of a standing army. Thus, a lack of order, hierarchy, and purpose prevailed in New York’s fledgling police department. Thus, a lack of rules and restraints.

  Temple learned to navigate the workings of the police force alongside the political dynamics inside the Hibernian Hall as well, avoiding the “standard practices” common among the other policemen with whom he worked. He never took a bribe, never carried a billy club or administered pell-mell beatings, and rarely even lost his temper. He just studied things—a puddle of blood, a shard of glass, a dent in the wall, the words of witnesses, the arch of an eyebrow, the unexplained relationship—and made arrests. Then he went back on the street and did it again and again, cultivating informants, confidants, and supporters across the city.

  Policing also distracted him from the series of rejections he received when he tried to enlist in the Union army. Three times in, three times rejected, all at a time when the army was taking the shaggiest and most scurvy of conscripts. Damn my leg.

  In the wake of those rejections Temple threw himself more deeply into the society’s effort to move escaping slaves through New York and up into New England and Canada on the Underground Railroad.

  None of it amounted to serving in the Union army. Still, as a detective on the streets of New York, Temple felt engaged. It was the happiest he had ever been.

  Which may have been why his new profession got so miserable so quickly. Happiness, he decided, always had a way of eluding him.

  The cleaving came several months into Temple’s first year on the police force, when New York erupted. The city had begun percolating earlier when locals learned that Lincoln planned to arrange a draft and that officials would publicly draw numbers to decide who would be conscripted. New York had already sent a substantial contingent of volunteers to the war, and the first day of the drawings went quietly enough. Word then began spreading that anyone with three hundred dollars could avoid conscription by paying that amount to have someone serve in their stead. Temple was near Union Square when he first read of the provision, in a story with a headline declaring, “Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Fight.” Another story in the same paper pointed out that “$300 Men Are Worth Less Than $1,000 Slaves.”

  Tinderbox, Temple thought. Tinderbox.

  The Hibernians and their like stoked it, warning Irish lads and other laborers that free Negroes would pour up from the South and steal their jobs. Temple watched this play out at Hibernian Hall and elsewhere and warned Matsell and Johnny Kennedy, the police superintendent, that it would come to a boil. Watch the firemen and watch the gangs, he told them. When things started to tip, it was the smokies who stirred it up first, with the crew from the Black Joke, Engine Company 33, stoning and then setting fire to the draft office on 47th Street. Johnny went up there for a look and, even without his uniform on, got thumped to within an inch of the abyss by Marty Sheehan’s firemen.

  Temple and others had rousted enough policemen downtown to help hold back the rioters there, though several from the Hibernian spat at him and labeled him a traitor. Uptown, however, a bloody and unforgiving riot ensued, snaking around the streets in angry, malicious waves. White rioters openly beat Negroes in the streets; they chased one into an alley, beat him, and then hung him from a tree limb and set him on fire. They lynched ten others as well, one from a lamppost. They burned and looted the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, though the police there helped evacuate more than two hundred children out of the back of the building without harm. Chasing down two white women who had married Negroes, a crowd beat them with clubs and bricks, leaving placards on their unconscious bodies that labeled them as “amalgamationists.”

  Downtown remained largely safe, except near the docks on the East River. White longshoremen and black dockworkers there engaged in an epic set- to not far from the van der Donk building. Longshoremen destroyed bawdy houses, taverns, and tenements that served or housed Negroes and then stripped the clothing off the white owners of those establishments and paraded them through the streets naked.

  In the end, the military entered the city and fired on the crowds, quelling the riot. The day it finally subsided, Temple was guarding the door of Daniel Lane’s dance house on Walnut Street in Corlears Point, where three Hibernians had come to thump Mary Burke, a white adventuress who specialized in servicing Negroes.

  “Come through the door, then you’ve got to come through me, boys,” Temple said to them.

  Temple was known on the streets as a dangerous and perplexing brawler—for the unpredictable use he made of his cane and a prodigious strength unexpected in someone so lanky—and the group considered his warning and turned. On their way back down Walnut Street they waved their clubs and swore at him in a streak of creative obscenities that Temple found to be almost poetic and, at a minimum, musical. One of them cupped his hand to his mouth and emitted the long, plaintive howl of a dog. Temple decided there and then never to visit the Hibernian Hall again.

  After he got Mary onto a horse and out of Corlears, he headed over to the docks to look in on the boardinghouse where some of the Negroes falsely accused in the van der Donk case lived. When he arrived, there was a crush of rioters at the door of the boardinghouse—hundreds more than had been in Corlears—and they were dragging screaming Negroes into the street. Two already hung dead from streetlamps, their feet bloody and dripping. Temple paused less than a quarter block away from the
boardinghouse, uncertain of what to do. The rioters were as fearsome a lot as he had ever encountered, their eyes bulging and their voices bristling with rage. A wave of apprehension rippled through Temple’s chest and broadened into an immobilizing fear that he had never felt in his life until that moment. He imagined himself pounced upon by the mob, his head pounded into a pulp, and he stood rooted to his spot as the violence continued to unfold in front of him.

  Cassius Marks, one of the Negroes who walked from jail a free man in the van der Donk case due to Temple’s handiwork, was hauled from the boardinghouse by two men, one of whom pounded Cassius’s back with a club. Cassius leaned back on his heels and tried to pull away as he was dragged deeper into the mob, but two other men grabbed him around the waist and pulled him into the scrum. His eyes darted about as he looked for help from someone, and in a brief flash his eyes locked on Temple. A glimmer of hope washed across Cassius’s face and he nodded to Temple, leaning back again from the tugs of the mob. Two people tore his pants from his waist, but he remained fixated on Temple, nodding but unable to speak.

  Temple couldn’t move.

  Rioters knocked Cassius to the ground and swarmed around him, tying a rope around his scrotum and dragging him through the streets by it until he was unconscious; a fourteen-year-old boy then knelt on Cassius’s stomach and plunged a knife into his chest.

  Temple never moved.

  The mob swelled uptown from the docks, leaving blood smears, bits of clothing, and several bodies, including Cassius’s, scattered about the streets. After they had gone, Temple walked to the piers, leaned out over the East River, and vomited.

  He spent the next two weeks gambling, drinking, and sleeping during the day. On two nights he awoke to find Cassius sleeping next to him, bleeding and looking at him with the same soundless, plaintive stare he had given him at the docks. One afternoon, as a runaway horse bolted down Broadway and galloped past Temple, Cassius bounced along on his back at the end of a rope tied to the stallion. Cassius stared at Temple again, looking for help.